I'm still enjoying this game, managed to get all the upgrades done on the first island. Now moved onto the second island. Its still got challenge in it. I think i will be able to finish it. Tend to play it for a bit after some Blop 2, they merge quite well into each other.

Fantastic job not fixing the 'permanently holstered weapons' game-ending bug Ubi, over FOUR MONTHS after release.

Just got hit by it during the Payback mission after the hallucination sequence. The fucking game autosaved mid-mission and for some ridiculously stupid reason has taken away the Abandon Quest option on this one goddamn occasion. Which means I'm stuck with it.

Posted this in recently completed games thread but also thought it'd be worth posting here as well.

Finished this last night. I do love the environment and the freedom you have approaching each new combat situation, but there were a few things that really annoyed me.

Firstly, the context sensitive controls could be a real pain in the arse. There were a few occasions when my character wouldn't put out flames or change weapon because, seemingly, the game needed to finish an animated sequence first, despite telling me to press a particular button. It usually meant that I had to give it a second or so before it would properly let me do what I needed to do, by which point I was usually dead. I also found it to be a pain when needing to quickly loot bodies for weapons when the proverbial hit the fan.

My second issue revolved around how superfluous some of the side missions were. Real rinse and repeat stuff. As others have mentioned, it seemed that they built this terrific environment and only thought after how to populate it with things to do.

My major gripe, however, was the horrible story. By any criteria the writing and characterization is terrible. The story as whole is pretty objectionable:the locals are only able to throw off the violent oppression of the pirates when ‘Snow White’ turns up, with his ivy league diploma, camera phone and douche-bag haircut.

On top of that, no one is remotely believable, relatable or likable, even the supposed ‘good guys’. In fact I’d say the main protagonist and his friends are some of the most loathsome characters you’re supposed to emphasise with I’ve ever experienced in a video game. They really do feel like they’ve been written for a teenage American market.

Part of this is inherent problem FPSs use to tell stories i.e. always using the character’s fixed perspective during exposition. Whenever a character has some big speech it's always from the completely undramatic and flat framing of Brody’s view. It feels so amateur, like watching a home video.

They also do that irritating GTA thing of making every speech long-winded, melodramatic, verbose and full of unnecessary gesticulations. It just kills any sense of tension - most character interactions are bizarre, arbitrary and cliched. Given how serious Far Cry 3 takes itself, and how adult some of the issues it addresses are, I can’t imagine this was what they were aiming for.

There’s nothing wrong with shifting the angle during exposition. Third-person games do it all the time. Why can’t FPSs do it?

Developers: cinematic conventions and language are useful for a reason. Don’t be afraid to use them. Oh, and employ better writers

The first person thing was weird for me. I mean how all the other characters were all up in your face. It worked fine for Vaas, since he was supposed to be a crazy dude, but even when you're talking to friends and allies, it felt like they were 2 inches in front of your face. Like, if you were to do a third person view of these people talking, it'd look like they were almost touching faces.

Been playing this on the 360 over the last week, just a couple more missions to do. It's odd, the way that it swings between being pretty awesome and being very much less-so.

Main gripes has been some of the main missions have been below par. Some have been boring, some have been infuriating. And the side "story" missions are often tedious.

But I actually like most of the cast, not so much Jason's friends, but the island dwellers have been fairly memorable, protaganists and antagonists alike.

The game is at it's best just wandering around, clearing bases and such. I like how a stealthy attempt at clearing a base can quickly turn into a small scale war (though as you get better and learn how to clear the bases this happens less which is almost a shame).

Farcry 3 has been mentioned several times on articles about Assassins Creed 3. I don't think the two are entirely comparable, but I do think both games suffer largely from the same faults.

Just started a rerun on the new 'master' difficulty. Enemies do more damage now and seem to be a bit more aware. Maybe.

I'm also playing with the detection meter turned off, which seems better, I found it far too easy to avoid being seen before. I always had the jump on the enemies so was virtually never surprised by them when exploring/traveling/murdering tapirs. It's good to be on the back foot now and then.

Also I still love the random encounters in this. Was on my way back to an outpost to stock-up on ammo and find 2 pirates holding up a couple of villager's jeep, accusing them of being with rebels. It turns into a mass shout-out with the villagers screaming while bullets fly past their heads. Then minutes later save 2 more village people (not those village people), only for one of them to immediately be attacked by a komodo, so I shoot the komodo… and the villager… oops.

Fucks sake, woke up too early and couldn't get back to sleep so decided to have a blast on Far Cry 3, only bought it a couple of weeks ago so I'm not that far through it and was itching to play, NOPE, their servers are down which makes the game unplayable because it freezes when you press the start button by trying to access their servers so it's in a constant loop with no option to quit without exciting the game.